Final Year University Projects

Unfortunately, my application was declined from Timico, which was quite surprising! I felt as though my previous experience and skills matched the job description. This rejection gives me the opportunity to share my submission (in following posts) and make improvements to my CV & Cover Letter using the knowledge I have gained during the Professional Practice lectures.

Since my last post, I have not applied to any postgraduate courses. I was considering the User Experience Design MA at Falmouth University, as the course was an online part-time flexible learning course. However when speaking to Steve, he mentioned his connections that have worked at the University who suggest it is not a great place for students to learn and does not think the online nature is good for a masters course. He suggested that it is harder to network and bounce ideas off one another when the course is online and although I agree to some extent, I do believe online learning suits me better for the most part. Erasing Falmouth off the list, I ended up back at square one again. When applying for my undergraduate degree, I followed my gut and applied to Herts. Although we have faced problems on the course with in-consistent programme leaders (which honestly we should have been compensated for), Digital Media Design was and still is the absolute correct course content for my inte...

As part of the CV, Cover Letter and Gratitude Letter part of the assignment, I decided to apply for a 3 month Junior Designer contract at Timico. As I was considering leaving my retail job at Sainsbury's, this role was appropriate and more achievable  for the remainder of my studies. As  the position required remote working, in theory it would be less exhausting and physically draining than Sainsbury's.  When working from home for the remaining four months at Disney, I didn't have another IBS flare-up and was able to complete my work to a higher standard. Therefore this role would have suited me at this point in my career. Especially since I felt  I had all the skills/experience needed for this role and the responsibilities were relatively simple. 

I have created an instagram support page for Grumble Tum. I hope to create a platform to share recipes and the experiences of other IBS sufferers. I hope to update the page further with information, and add posts soon as well as promoting this  page on my social media platforms. I feel the lemon project has helped me discover the most successful ways to promote an Instagram page and should benefit me throughout the degree project.

Although I had planned the structure of my website/app, I still needed to plan the type of content that would be included. Therefore, I compiled this information in different categories to aid the planing process.

I decided to limit my primary colour scheme, to not include as many colours compared to my previous colour scheme. This ensures that colours don't clash and my work looks professional. These colours appear to be calming but bold and confident, which is the overall effect I would like the user to experience.

Everything has been quite stressful lately, so for no reason at all I thought I would write a blog post on Club Penguin. This game is very nostalgic to me, and was sadly closed down in 2017 by Disney. Since then, developers with a lot of time on their hands have revived the game calling it Club Penguin Rewritten.  I thought I would play the game when I had some spare time to see what the community is like, and whether the game was different to what I remember.  It was quite an interesting experience, I named my account Garlic Lover. There are NPC characters that rarely visit the island during events at specific times. This consisted of Aunt Arctic, who writes an advice column in the Club Penguin Times newspaper and Sensei, the sensei of the dojo and master of card-jitsu. But odd things kept happening... Sensei decided to randomly sit next to me, even though I thought the character was programmed into the game. While I was 'chilling' at another penguin's igloo, loads of peng...

After my tutorial with Dean, it was obvious that my portfolio website still needed tweaking. Therefore, I have decided to add these changes to a Trello board. This will allow me to work through these changes, and plan my daily tasks.  It is important that I complete the portfolio site before completing the other deliverables, as I will need to start applying for jobs and postgraduate study which require a link to a portfolio website. Adding a deliverables list may be helpful when planning the remainder of this assignment.

To help me plan my content planning for Grumble Tum's app, I decided to create a basic wireframe showcasing the navigation system. 

I decided to create a sitemap in order to easily plan my content. This will be used as the basis of my website navigation.

I decided to update my colour scheme and fonts to be more consistent and contrasting. Dean thought the colour aubergine suited my style more than 'rotten peach'. Funnily enough, battered aubergine is a traditional Italian snack to have alongside a meal, and have enjoyed this enormously for as long as I could remember. I agree that this colour does suit me in more ways than just my personality. Dean also mentioned the large amount of white on my website, which I had used as a background colour. White can be quite strong, almost seeming as though it is attacking your eyes in the incorrect lighting. Therefore, I decided to choose a pale purple that compliments the aubergine colour as a substitute for the white on my homepage. The bright purple, was colour picked from my logo and I decided to use my already existing salmon/peach  colour as this contrasts well against the purples. Moreover, Dean mentioned that my header font wasn't quite right and recommended I choose a cursive ...

I decided to use my own name to brand myself because Sofia Gattuso is quite a unique name. After searching, there are only two other Sofia Gattuso's on Instagram and one other on MySpace. It seems that the majority of the search results were links to articles/social media about me specifically. As my name has been listed on other websites, I already have an online presence therefore keeping my brand name the same means all relevant information will come up when my name is searched including my portfolio website. If I wanted to further distance myself from the few that share my name, I could add my middle name (Alessandra) or the first letter of my middle name to my brand name - that MySpace account is questionable. I wanted to design a logo that clearly showcased my personality. Prior to wearing masks, I was known for always being a smiley person. Even to the extent that others in my secondary school, disliked me for this trait. I enjoy smiling at people as I feel this helps to bri...

I originally coded my online portfolio in 2019, while I was seeking an industry placement during my second year. Prior to this, I used a variety of content management systems and website builders to showcase my projects. I mainly used Weebly and Adobe portfolio but felt the templates available weren't very bespoke or highly customisable and unfortunately wasn't able to show my personality effectively. As my existing portfolio had become outdated, I started to re-code this during the summer of 2020. While on placement, I had no opportunities to code so it became more difficult for me to build the site from scratch.  To apply for postgraduate applications with an early deadline or job opportunities, I needed to quickly populate my portfolio into a website. Therefore, I briefly attempted to use Squarespace. However, I found this very limiting and not as customisable in comparison. Due to this, it was taking me a long time to achieve anything in the way that I wanted so  I decided...

At 3am, I have been thinking about graduation and which path is best to take afterwards - hopefully, this blog post is coherent. With the never-ending existence of the pandemic, I'm unsure whether this has substantially affected the number of jobs in the creative industry, especially at entry-level. Although it's not impossible to get a job, I have seen my peers who graduated in 2020 struggle to find a creative role, as applying becomes more competitive.  Therefore, I have been looking at other options in case 2021 follows a similar pattern to 2020.  Postgraduate Study While working at Disney, a number of my colleagues shared their regret about not doing a masters. They felt it was too late in their career to go back to studying, which was largely due to their financial commitments and stability.  I decided to take this into consideration, and started looking at masters degrees and what they would entail. My main plan was to seek employment after graduating but I wasn't h...

The joys of IBS. Holding onto my job at Sainsbury's is proving to be quite difficult. I actually like the job itself, customers are usually polite and my colleagues are lovely. The issue are my absences and the whole procedure surrounding sickness. Sainsbury's absence policy automatically invokes a disciplinary meeting if you: Have three instances of absences within a year Have absences higher than 3% (worked out by how much you have worked) It turns out having one absence during your probationary period (three months long) invokes a meeting as this is calculated to go over the 3%. So realistically I stand no chance against this system and am likely to be called up every-time I have an absence because I have already gone over this percentage. I was meant to receive a disciplinary meeting after my first absence (missing one shift) because I had already gone over the 3% and was verbally informed of this. However, after many of the managers were off-sick with the coronavirus, thi...

The biggest part of this project is condensing the information about IBS and making it easier to understand. This is difficult because the information is so vast, which makes the planing of this content important. This approach does go slightly against my gantt chart and may likely cause me to fall behind slightly, but feel that this is worth it to speed up my workflow at more critical points in the year. In previous posts I have briefly planned the sections that I would like to include: Home In this section, I would like to have a welcome message including: Basic information about IBS What is IBS? Living with IBS Symptoms Causes & Triggers Treatments Low FODMAP Diet Stages of the diet Foods to avoid Recipes  Useful resources Community Case Studies Facebook Support Group Instagram Support Group Useful Tips Nearest public toilet locator Coping mechanisms While I plan my content, I am going to start looking into Bootstrap templates in order to f...